2434 - A Voice Actor’s Take on AI and the Future of Voice Work with Aaron Ryan

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

0:56With us right now, Aaron Ryan. Aaron, you are, dare I say, a prolific author. You're working on book number 50, and that just blows my mind. Many of us struggle to get one book out at some point in our life, and here you are cranking out number 50 right now. This looks to be a lot of works of fiction, But I also want to note, Aaron, that you do a lot of B2B voiceover work. And so because of your experience in that, I'm actually really intrigued to kind of get your assessment of that world. But before we do, Aaron, I always love hearing from high-level leaders what they're doing for fun on the outside when they're not at work.

1:40And I know you've got a couple of younger kids. What do you guys do for fun together? Well, the kids love movies, number one. So we're all movieholics. We're just a movie, movieholic family. And so the super Mario Brothers movies are huge right now. Minecraft movie, things like that. But we love to go to we love to go on vacation. We just went to Ocean Shores last weekend or two weekends ago. And it was in tandem with the Washington UFO Summit. I wrote an alien invasion saga. So my books really belong there. and we had a great time at Ocean Shores, but we go outside, we play Frisbee. We hit the tennis ball against the shop and have it ricochet back and hit it again.

2:19It's the simple things in life that work really well for the young kids. So I'm excited, Aaron, to kind of talk about your work. Do you mind maybe just a little bit of table setting here? Just kind of give us an overview of your work and then obviously want to talk about because it's a great business owner audience And there's a lot of great AI tools right now. I'm a fan of some of the products that Eleven Labs has produced. And I know a lot more people are using way more voices than ever before. It's amazing how much voiceover work is being done now, which I think is great. but we're going to get into where it absolutely makes sense to work with a voiceover professional.

3:05I'm going to get to that in just a little bit. Tell us a little bit more, Aaron, about your work professionally, if you could, including all of your writing. Yeah, well, it's a very storied career. Did you see what I did there as an author? It's very storied. Right now I have two dual storyteller tracks. So on the one hand, I get to be a storyteller for other people telling their stories as a voice actor. On the other track, I am my own storyteller telling my stories, and there's several behind me. A lot of different genres. Primarily, my wheelhouse is sci-fi, but there's historical fiction, literary criticism, business guides, poetry, kids' books.

3:43Just kind of follow the rabbit trail for whenever I get a thought for a book. So I'm working on books number 50 and 51. But I started out as a self-employed entrepreneur in 2007. my first go-to service was basically transferring videos to DVD for people and custom video production. And that morphed very quickly into corporate videography, which then morphed quickly into wedding videography. And pardon me while I purge, I'll never do that again. No wedding videography for me. But I really, it was a breadwinning pursuit for many, many years. So I I found myself kind of trapped in wedding videography.

4:21And in tandem with that, I was providing voiceovers as an add-on. So if I would produce a video for a company, and they were all companies, they weren't ever personal people. I did later branch into like posterity videos for memorial videos for aging folks to tell their story. But for the corporate folks, I would produce the video and then they would go, that's great, thanks, that's a wrap. now we just need a voiceover actor or voiceover artist. And I'd say, oh, well, I can do that. And then I would record it as an add-on. I didn't consider providing voiceovers as a service unto themselves until roughly 2016.

5:00So I branched out and I've since become, I mean, I've made probably$3 million since 2007 in voiceovers. I started 2016 in voiceovers. It used to be very lucrative. Right now I am the voice of UnitedHealthcare. So that has provided us union money, which is awesome. It's provided us insurance qualifying, which is awesome. But it's an eroding career in the face of things like AI. So I mean, it's a very incendiary topic. And things like 11 Labs have really eroded my voiceover career. I'm sorry, I've given them high praise. Obviously, There's all kinds of different tools. I'm not opposed to assistive AI in any sense.

5:47So when you use AI tools to assist, but generative AI is a whole different beast. And generative AI is harming the voiceover industry and the authoring industry in many ways. I'm happy at which to share. But that's kind of my multimedia business pursuit in a scoop since about 2007. so let's so obviously you've done quite a bit of voice work um are there instances where do you think uh ai is kind of a maybe an obvious choice uh when we're talking about uh voiceover from your perspective and where do you still like i have some ideas on this um but where do you see voice talent, someone who has done this for years and years and years, what do they bring to the table that an AI voice tool would not?

6:47Yeah, there's several things. One of them is nuance. Another one is the idiosyncrasies of the human voice. Breath can be simulated now in AI voicing, so they'll actually add breath and it'll make it sound much more attainable as a human representation of the voice. But they've done studies, and I don't have the exact links in front of me right now, but like written word media, I believe is one of the studies where it came from, that audiobook listeners, for example, do not want, they're very opposed to hearing a robotic or a synthetic or an AI voice bring their stories to life. There's something about that intangibility and untouchability and that disconnect, that inherent disconnect when you're listening to a synthetic voice.

7:34Yeah, the authenticity, which is something that I'm sensitive to, you know, which is why, you know, I've seen some YouTubers, you know, they'll do like AI versions of themselves. And I'm like, man, I feel like if I did that with my audience, I mean, it just, I wouldn't feel good about that. That's just my, but I'm just talking about my personal brand, but I know I'm not alone in that. And so it's almost like my sensitivity to not wanting to push slop in front of my audience, because quite frankly, they deserve better from me. They deserve my personal attention and care in my art. You know, it's like almost like a musician who, yeah, listen, we could do backing tracks for everything on stage when we perform for a crowd, But we are going to do the extra manual hard work to give our audience the show that they deserve.

8:34Exactly. Yeah, totally. There's an inherent disconnect. One of the biggest things, though, that I left for third, for last, is directability. So one of the things that we do as voice actors, it's very frequently done, is you do directed sessions with a client live on the other end. So with the beauty of the internet, I can record in my studio in Seattle. They can be in Timbuktu, all the way across the world and receive the files from me in real time. And what they want to do is they want to hear the script performed and presented a certain way. So I have an idea in my head of how I want it to be heard, how I want to bring it to life.

9:10The way they would like it intoned is often different. So in a directed session that's live, they'll say, okay, now do it this way. This is take number three. whatever, and say it this way, emphasis on this syllable, or do it with a little smile, a little wink in your voice. And that directability gives them the upper hand in bringing it to life with a very human voice that relates to them, a human. Now, the drawback that you have with some of these softwares, yes, they're getting more and more believable, and they're very cheap and affordable, is you can simply upload a script, you can have it converted to a voice, we're done, good, that's a wrap, and send it to press.

9:48but there's fine tuning that really needs to be done with all of those words and the inflection isn't directable in AI the breath isn't directable in AI you have constant tweaking that you'll need to do to make it sound not synthetic and we hear that you know when you when you actually hear an AI voice out there whether it's an audiobook or something else you constantly are finding yourself or at least I am, and many of my colleagues are doing, and we're, I would say that we are probably biased because we know what to listen for. But we hear that little lack of authenticity, lack of human touch and go, was that, this is AI.

10:26And it's obvious. And then there's an inherent disconnect. You know, it's probably not too dissimilar to watching a movie that just has among you know the the talent the best acting talent on the planet versus a b movie and you know these are all the the acting oh yeah right it's it it takes you out of it and you know and you know for me when when i see a movie and it's just got really bad acting i it just i lose all sense of believability. Then I start saying, you know, I just don't care. That's what the director's for. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the director brings out the best performance in the actor.

11:16And it's hard to do that. One of the best phrases I ever heard, and this is in the authoring industry, was from an editor. I wish I'd noted down who said it. But she said this quote, and it was it's like it just resonated and sent ripple effects to the authoring industry. She said, and I quote, are you using AI to write your books? If so, stop that. I cannot bring out your voice if it wasn't there to begin with. And one of the key things as an author is, you know, Oscar Wilde said, be yourself. Everyone else has already taken. We need to not be, we need to not be another Tolkien, Clancy, Crichton, you know, Suzanne Collins, be ourselves with our unique voice.

11:55And it's hard to do that when your AI is trained on the backs of creatives for decades. So yeah, you need to be yourself. I dig it. Aaron, how do people hire you for voice work? Like, how does that work? How do you how do you set your fees? Like, what does engagement typically look like? Yeah, well, there's fair market rates, which again, are just constantly being eroded. Those are you can get a Really good deal now. Yeah, yes, exactly. Better deal, I should say. Act now while supplies last. Yeah, right. There's a fair market rate guide that is based on SAG-AFTRA rates, but it is non-union tailored.

12:31So there's that. I have agents. I have several agents that get me voiceover work that is union and non-union. So they know what to look for and what the rates are. And then I have a huge cache of a repeat clientele that continues to come back and draw upon my services. But there are great marketplaces that are not so great as well, because they are wonderful as far as getting good voiceover work on a regular basis. But they're also responsible for driving down the rates in terms of the non-union side of things, like Voice123, Voices.com, VoPlanet.com. Those are all marketplaces that you pay a yearly fee, and you are therefore eligible to audition for their huge cache of clients that post jobs through them.

13:18And so I've got a lot of work through those. Yeah. You know, the last thing I was going to say is, you know, again, a good voice actor can probably be a little bit consultative, right? So if you're like, you know, the client, like, well, look, I mean, here's kind of what we're hoping for, what we want. You know, an experienced voice actor is going to say, well, let me share some ideas with you about and, you know, to get the client to think about the things that they may have not considered, which is why, you know, you want someone in that position. whereas you know and again an ai service is not going to consult with you they're basically just going to give you here what your prompt request here's your is your output and there may be some dials on the screen you know so you might be able to turn up the uh the brightness uh you know of it and certainly kind of pick the voice to kind of match with it but if you're inexperienced at this You might pick a voice and that may be like a really bad choice because it sounds cool to you.

14:19It may just not be very industry standard. And there's a reason we have a standard in the industry. So, well, Aaron, this is very cool. Your website is authorarinryan.com. When somebody goes there, obviously, go look at Aaron's immense wall of books that he's written. Uh, clearly you have a great presence on, on, uh, Amazon as well. But, um, uh, when people go there, what would you recommend they do? Well, it really depends on your flavor of books. So, and I do make it hard. Stephen King, horror. I mean, it's really easy. Tolkien, fantasy. Um, it's very easy to do that. And then there's, there's renowned, uh, children's books and that is their wheelhouse and renowned, uh, historical fiction and literary criticism and thrillers and blah, blah, blah.

15:07I like to keep my palette wide, and I like to use a lot of colors. And I just, you know, right now I'm working on a second horror novel, but I just published three children's books. It's really hard to make that gear shift. But if they like fantasy, pardon me, if they like fiction, there is my best-selling and award-winning Alien Invasion saga called Dissonance. It's for those joining us visually, it's up here. and the first volume of that the green one called reality that's actually been adapted for the screen and it's currently being pitched to streaming networks right now and no one has said no so I'm very excited about that so that is probably the bestseller I've got a Christian dystopian saga called the end thrillers forecast the slide the phoenix experiment take your pick and and enjoy a great escapist read that's very well focused on a lot of heart yeah you've you've got a big following on Amazon.

16:06Your reviews are off the charts. Goodreads loves you. So you've been doing the right stuff. Aaron, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for this. Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

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